Teacher Preparation for Today's Schools

A podcast from Teachers College, Columbia University focusing on work in higher education that aims to improve our world.

Pursuing the Public Good is connected to a broader initiative at Teachers College focusing on efforts to tackle crucial challenges in Teacher Education, Mental Health and Wellness, Sustainability, and Digital Innovation.

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Thomas Bailey:
Welcome to Pursuing the Public Good, where we talk about how research and scholarship in higher education connects to practice with a focus on impact. I'm Tom Bailey, President of Teachers College, Columbia University, and your host. This week's topic is a big one, teacher education. Of course, teachers are responsible for student learning and confront an increasingly diverse group of students from many different backgrounds and environments with many different individual needs. And we know that there's a national teacher shortage. Many schools are having trouble finding enough teachers and enrollment in teacher education programs is falling. Teacher pay continues to be a problem. Also, K-12 teachers are at the front lines, increasingly vulnerable to politicized attacks. They have been targeted in culture war debates about LGBTQ rights, teaching history, what books they can use, and so much more. So the question we ask today is, how do we prepare teachers to enter the workplace in times like these?
Our guest today is here to help us sort this all out. Celia Oyler is Vice Dean for Teacher Education here at Teachers College. Among other things, her work is in classroom-based collaborative research on social justice, equity, and accessible pedagogy. Celia, thank you for joining us.

Celia Oyler:
Well, pleased to be here, Tom.

Thomas Bailey:
You've talked about the need for transformational change in teacher preparation. What are the challenges you're seeing and why is it so important that we get it right?

Celia Oyler:
Transformational change is something that we're always thinking about as teachers because when we teach, we mean to change people. Teaching by very definition involves transformation. When we think about what does it mean to transform university-based teacher education, we're really looking specifically at making it possible for public school teachers to be prepared to teach all students. And that is a transformative change in this country in the last 40 years since I became a teacher. Traditionally, we've separated out teacher education by field and discipline. So if you're going to be a social studies teacher, you are prepared with a real strong knowledge base around social studies content and what we call pedagogical content knowledge for social studies. Well, to take a transformative approach to teacher education, we're really looking at preparing social studies teachers to also be very skilled at welcoming newcomers who don't speak English into the classroom or maybe who've had seriously interrupted formal schooling opportunities.
If you've spent two years walking from Venezuela to the United States, crossing the border and then getting put on a bus and dropped off in Times Square, your background knowledge is very different from the background knowledge of the traditional teacher who's been prepared to teach social studies to students who were born in the United States and who are citizens. So the specialized knowledge of teaching students who are newcomers to our country, who are newcomers to English, the specialized knowledge of teaching students with particular and varied disabilities means that we have to take a different approach to what we do in our university teacher education programs. We can't work in our silos anymore. We really have to collaborate. I just came, actually, from a planning session where we had TESOL, teaching English to speakers of other languages, and teaching students with disability professors, English professors, science professors, making long lists of what does every teacher who graduates from our program, particularly our teacher residency program, what do we want them to be able to do?
And the lists were very long and they involved being responsive to students, to communities, to families, as opposed to being faithful to our curriculum guides. So I think historically, teaching was seen as a set of knowledge that was imparted to students. We look at early days of curriculum in this country and there were primers and there were lists. If you were in third grade a hundred years ago, there were lists of geographic features that every third grader should know. We've gone so far beyond that notion of curriculum and of knowledge. We're really looking at a different approach to knowledge construction for the future. What does it mean to prepare public school children for a future that's very uncertain and very unknown? That takes bold moves on our part to change what we do in pre-service teacher education.

Thomas Bailey:
That sounds really exciting, but I guess I have a practical question. That's very demanding for teachers. There's all sorts of experiences that students have that are coming into a classroom. And so we want teachers to be prepared to address the individual needs of all of those, to understand, first of all, they're sort of researchers understanding, and then at the same time address them. So how can we prepare teachers to be able to do that multitude of things, which, of course, sounds great, but it seems like a daunting task as educators of teachers?

Celia Oyler:
It's true that what it means to be a teacher today is extremely more complicated than it was a hundred years ago, because our world is more complicated than it was a hundred years ago. To prepare people for the technological world requires very skillful balancing of knowledge that you're trying to help students build, but also skills that they need as they navigate the complicated world that we're living in. So rather than think about individualization, you mentioned that there's these individuals who have the individual needs, I'd like to suggest that instead we prepare teachers to think about access for all. So the on-ramp that you build to access the, let's say, academic language in your science curriculum, the on-ramp you build for the learner who is just learning English can also provide a ramp of access for the student who might have a language disability. The very things you do to provide access for one might actually provide access for way more than one.
When we think about the critical skill of universal design for learning, that is an approach to teaching and learning that says there's multitudes of ways that people access knowledge, so how do we make classrooms places of rich variety of ways to get knowledge in and ways to express knowledge?

Thomas Bailey:
In your paper, you wrote something which I found really fascinating. This is a quote from you, "Preparing teachers to help students learn print literacies was a key goal a century ago. Now, we not only prepare teachers for print literacies, but many other forms of literacy as well, including critical media literacies, digital literacies, navigating claims for artificially generated texts, multilingual literacies, assistive literacies, youth culture literacies and civic literacies." So say some more about what that really means. We're, of course, hearing people need to learn to read, and we've worked hard to try to figure out how to do that, but at the same time, so what does that mean to be able to prepare teachers to deal with these other types of literacies?

Celia Oyler:
Certainly that is the work of so many faculty at Teachers College, which is to look at the myriad forms of literacy, whether we're talking about scientific literacies, we could add to the list for teacher preparation, we could talk about racial literacies, how competent I am as a white person to navigate different kinds of racial knowledge and ways of being. So there's so much that goes into ideas of literacies. What does it mean to be a literate person? It's no longer just good enough to be able to read the word. And Paulo Freire talked about the essential importance of being able to read the world. So really, we're going back to Paulo Freire, the great Brazilian politician and educator who created the literacy crusade in Brazil and then went on to make literacy crusades all across the world. What does it mean to read the world? What are all the ways that we want people when they graduate from high school to be able to read the world?
For instance, as a parent, I want my high school graduates to be able to be good consumers, to be able to read the label of a nutrition back of a box. I want them to have the scientific knowledge to know what makes up all of those things. I want them to be able to read a newspaper article with statistics and be able to analyze what those statistics are saying and what they aren't saying. I want them to be able to know that the URL that they're getting information from, I want them to be able to evaluate that URL. Look right now on how many deep fakes we have. We have so many opportunities for people to be misled. So if we want people to be good citizens, and I use the word not to mean citizenship papers, but to be good resident citizens of this city, of this state, of this country, of this world, what are all the ways they need to be able to know and find out? That's what literacy is.

Thomas Bailey:
So why don't you tell us a bit more about the teacher residency model that you're working on and that you just mentioned before.

Celia Oyler:
Yes, I'm happy to talk about teacher residencies because that's something that's happening across the United States with Department of Labor money. Because of the teacher shortage that you mentioned earlier, we do have a little bit of a national crisis on how are we going to get teachers in our highest needs areas such as science, math, teaching students with disabilities, teaching English as a second language. How do we get people to take those jobs? One of the great disincentives for a traditional teacher education program such as at Teachers College where we have very clinically rich programs that require almost a full year of taking time off from work, is that not everybody can afford to take a year off from work and to do an intensive, rigorous year-long program like we have at Teachers College where you're really spending, such as in the elementary inclusive program, you're spending four semesters of field work. There's not too many people, especially in New York City, could take a year off or two years off to do that.
So what a teacher residency program allows is for the teacher residents to be embedded in a school, or two schools or a district, and they become part of that community, learning the whole community, learning the whole school, not just apprenticing with one-on-one as a student teacher and a mentor teacher, but really living in that community and knowing what it means to be a teacher in that context, and they get paid. So that's the piece that we're so excited about. The new program that Teachers College is part of called the Empire State Teacher Residency, which begins in September, each resident gets $30,000 stipend, which can really make the difference for someone being able to afford to come to Teachers College who never before would've been able to afford to come to Teachers College. And in addition to that, the labor of the mentor teachers in the schools is being acknowledged, and they also get a stipend. Because in the traditional teacher education program, they're not really recognized, they're not really developed, there isn't very much intentional formalized learning for those school-based teacher educators.
So a residency approach allows us to really expand the learning of all members of the teacher education community, including faculty who, in a residency approach, will be spending a significant amount of time in the neighborhood schools.

Thomas Bailey:
This image of the professor, the teacher, and I guess the student, working together, obviously learning from each other, that's a wonderful image. And of course, obviously the pay. We have apprentices. When a plumber is learning to do their skills, they're also getting paid, so it doesn't seem like that much of a stretch. So I guess there's two issues though about that. We have many teacher education students here. How many of them can we really realistically get into that? I mean, not only from the time that it takes for the teacher or the professor or the student to work together, but of course also just from the money. How can we go from this as a special project where you have to raise money from the Department of Labor to do it, to making this the way we prepare teachers to be teachers?

Celia Oyler:
Let's think about the example you gave from the trades. So the trades have figured out how to do it for electrical, for plumbing, the medical system has figured out how to do it, right? You do three years of medical school, then you do an internship, then you do a residency, and in your internship and in your residency, you're paid. So they've figured it out in medicine, they figured it out in the trades, what are we waiting for?

Thomas Bailey:
So there were two parts of my question. One was the time that it takes and does that mean we need to expand the number of professors we have or people we have working with them? And I guess the other one, I guess your answer to the financial one is we need to get a campaign to get legislatures, the federal government and the state legislatures, to recognize how important this is as an education modality, and I guess those are two issues there.

Celia Oyler:
Yes. I think, though, that it's tied up also in the value that we place on public education. Because you look across the country right now, cutbacks are draconianly being deployed on schools. New York City, for instance, is looking at a massive shortfall of money to fund just the schools. So if the schools are in crisis, there's no way that we could, at that moment, reimagine teacher education across the lifespan, but how important it is to think differently about teacher learning. How many professions are there where you study the field and then you get certified to go do it, and your job, in your first year, is just as complicated as the job of a thirty-year experienced person? So think about lawyers. No law firm expects a first-year lawyer to assume as full responsibility as the person who's made partner 15 years in. So how do we reimagine labor in schools to account for lifelong learning?
Here's a good example around the current crisis in reading. Why aren't we freeing up the people who are in the building who know how to teach students who have complicated reading trajectories? Why aren't we freeing them up to work with those students all day long? Why is it every teacher has to do exactly the same thing? That's an archaic notion. So if we're going to change the labor process of learning to teach, we have to first start with the labor process of schools and the funding mechanisms. Why do we have a funding mechanism in the United States based on real estate? Why should local communities have to raise their own money for schools? That's a really strange way to do it. Hardly any country in the world does it like that.

Thomas Bailey:
I hear that, and I completely understand why we need to do that given this crucial profession, which we all depend on so much. You've given us a campaign and a task to do. In practical terms though, in terms of the residency model that you're working on now for Teachers College, what would you consider stage two of that? So what's the next stage for us here at Teachers College?

Celia Oyler:
This is our fourth iteration of a teacher residency program. We had three previous versions funded by the federal government, and now we have this one funded by the state via New York City public schools, so we have 25 residents starting, and their stipends will be paid for. They will have tuition assistance through our Teacher Futures Award where each candidate will receive $30,000 in scholarship for a two-year dual certification program. So one of the key features of our residency program is that it's dual certification, meaning that if you're a science teacher, you'll also be prepared to teach students with disabilities, which greatly expands the candidate's hire-ability. I was looking in the New York Times education job sections, I don't know if in the Sunday Times you ever read those ads, but I always read the ads just to see what's needed, and so many districts are looking for dual certified teachers.
But by dual certification for our residency program, we don't mean A plus B, we mean, take a lot of the elements of A, take a lot of the elements of B and mix them up together and get creative about how our teacher education knowledge and skills development is imparted. Traditionally at Teachers college, the student teaches during the day and comes up to campus in the evening and takes courses, maybe three hours, goes back and tries some things out that they learned in their class the day before. We imagine a different ecology. We imagine, for instance, courses embedded in the schools so that school-based teacher educators could co-teach alongside a university professor. We were just talking in the retreat that I came from where we're planning the residency 4.0, what it would look like for a professor to do a demonstration lesson in a fourth grade classroom and get feedback from the teacher candidates and from the children as part of an ongoing learning community. So how do we break down the walls between Teachers College and schools and really look at learning from all people contributing to our knowledge?
We're talking about family adult members as teacher educators. So the adult family members coming into the school and educating the teacher candidates and the faculty about what matters to them. And that's where we move into cultural sustainability and cultural relevance. We're listening to the people in the community. We're not just thinking we know everything. We're setting ourselves up as a thin membrane so that we're merging who can be a knower? Who knows? Who's an expert? We're trying to change the entire ecosystem of teacher education by moving to a residency approach. And maybe we'll get lucky like the University of Buffalo and every single candidate there is a resident.

Thomas Bailey:
I mean, the image that you have of a teacher education and the types of skills that teachers... I want my children and grandchildren to be in classrooms with the types of teachers that you're talking about. But one approach we are advocating, or you're advocating, for these increasingly demanding jobs is a more expansive education, more funding for that, but there's also kind of a counter movement, which is actually making it easier for students to get certified as teachers, for cutting down the types of education that they are getting. So there's two competing narratives or images of what teacher education is. Could you say a bit about that?

Celia Oyler:
Well, I think it maps pretty well onto what we think is valuable knowledge. We really need to ask the question, what are schools for and what's worth knowing? And if your image of a teacher is that the teacher delivers knowledge that's already been formulated and is passed on to the next generation without question, kind of a didactic approach to what it means to be a student. "Oh, we're preparing children for high stakes testing to get the single right answer on an exam." That's a different kind of knowing than what we're talking about here. We're talking about a critical knowing. We're talking about being a maker of questions. We're talking about being a maker of the future. We're not talking about replicating knowledge from the past. So kind of a traditional approach to schools started, actually, you learned Latin and Greek. The wealthy men of the family would learn Latin and Greek and then go on to read law, for instance. That's a very narrow notion of knowing and of what knowledge is of most importance.
We're talking about a complex, politically situated, historically situated, socially situated, culturally situated form of knowing and acting, and that requires intellectuals, teachers who are intellectuals, not teachers who are robotic and who read scripts and who tell kids this is the right answer, that's the wrong answer.

Thomas Bailey:
So let me ask you kind of wrapping up here. What would you want a listener to take away from this? Is there anything listeners can do, even if they're not involved directly in the field of teacher preparation? That is to help get teachers the support and teaching conditions that you've talked about and that I think we all agree they deserve?

Celia Oyler:
To quote the Chicago Teachers Union mantra, "Teachers' working conditions are children's learning conditions." So our public schools are a precious resource that has to be treasured and supported. So what are the ways that the individual person is supporting their local public schools? That's the question you can ask yourself. What are you doing to help alleviate some of the stresses that are on teachers?

Thomas Bailey:
That makes a lot of sense, but I think many parents may not realize the kind of stressors that their teacher is in. I think we can ask them that question, but if they're not understanding what's confronting those teachers, they may not come up with an answer that we think might be good.

Celia Oyler:
Well, the question is framed within a much larger series of questions, which is, how do people contribute to the public good? And I think that's one of the things, as President of Teachers College, you've been really working hard on for the last couple of years is bringing us together, to have conversations about what is the public good and what are our efforts towards the public good? And of course, that raises the question, who are the publics and what is good? And what is good for one set of families, it might not be good for the other set of families, which is why we see such clash in the public sphere, because these are contested ideas. And as political differences get heightened, as we've seen in this country, those questions become more and more aggressive, and it requires that we, A, have good skills at collaborative democratic dialogue for pluralism, and two, that we have some critical humility to bring to the conversation and understand that our position is not the only position.
But I would like to see families, teachers, children have a large focus on collaborative dialogue. What does it mean to really listen? What does it mean to engage across our differences and to honor our different perspectives and reach some movement forward on what is the public good?

Thomas Bailey:
And that's exactly what we want to do with our Public Good Initiative at Teachers College. Of course, we're doing research that's crucial, we're individually working with teachers and teacher education students, and in some cases schools, but we have a much bigger job to do that goes beyond our borders, it goes beyond our walls here and that gets the word out about the types of things that we're doing, what we as a college can bring to that and at the same time how we need to convince the public and politicians the types of things we think are worth pursuing, which I think we're working very hard to do that here. So I want to thank you for joining us for this first season of Pursuing the Public Good. I always enjoy conversations with you. I learned so much. I'm an economist, so I can't say I came into this job with a lot of knowledge about teacher education, and it's always so good to talk to you about that.
I think we're very lucky to have you here coordinating and leading this work in our teacher education. And I think that as a college and as the professors that are interested or working on this, I think we're ready to take on this challenge, and I want to thank you so much for your contribution to that.

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Celia Oyler:
Thanks, Tom. But I also need to add in that the teacher educators at TC are very grateful to have a president who cares about teacher education. We don't take that for granted, so thank you.

Thomas Bailey: 
Thanks for listening. Next week, join us when we talk with Professor Nathan Holbert about how digital innovation can help make schools and other learning environments more playful, and why that matters. 
Pursuing the Public Good is produced by the Office of the President, the Digital Futures Institute, and the Office of Institutional Advancement at Teachers College, Columbia University. Take a look at our show notes for links to learn more about the work of our guests and the Public Good Initiative at Teachers College, access transcripts, and see our full credits for this episode.